[Retric]

Not when you look at objective metrics of bias such as sentiment analysis or track time spent on positive vs neutral vs negative coverage of various issues. Of course that’s in relation to US political parties, pick a different ‘center’ and you can get any answer you want for how the media is biased overall.

Objectively FOX isn’t pure propaganda they do include some coverage critical of R politicians and policies. It’s just far less than say CNN spends on coverage critical of D politicians and policies.

[slashdev]

I can cite multiple studies showing the left bias in the media. I think it's pretty widely held to be true. I'm actually kind of taken aback that anyone would take the other side of that argument.

[Retric]

I’m not arguing about the existence of bias or the numbers of L/R leaning media.

There’s simply more left leaning Americans vs the stance of the Republican Party who’s specifically engineered their message to appeal to voters with more political power. Ex: Losing the popular vote when winning the presidential election only happens to Republicans.

However, simply counting the number of companies leaning left or right doesn’t tell you much. A local newspaper with 5k readers just doesn’t move the needle. Neither does an outlet that’s 0.1% left or right leaning.

So the only accurate measurement is level of lean * number of viewers, and when you do that calculation (as I have) you find the overall media landscape leans Republican.

[slashdev]

That makes some sense to me, although the result is surprising. Do have anything you can point to for further reading on the subject?

[Retric]

There’s a few investigations into why Talk Radio became such a Republican dominated market, but I don’t have a good link. They also ignored how NPR fills a similar niche and leans left. But overall I setup a spreadsheet and ran the numbers on viewership vs scores on sites like:

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ Fox: FOX: 6.7, CNN -3.7, another site giving them 4 vs -2 etc.

Then used numbers from sites like https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/first-quarter-2025-cable-new...

So for most watched cable news show you get FOX 4,552k viewers vs CNN 558k viewers. Multiply and you get a rather shockingly different impact.

[slashdev]

Yeah, that's an interesting way of looking at it. Also I didn't realize Fox dominates so much.

It makes some sense!